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The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought

As you will learn from this collection
of essays, most written by Ayn Rand, her philosophy of Objectivism entailed
that she was neither a “liberal” (see chs. 10 and 13) nor a
“conservative” (chs. 8 and 14) nor a “Libertarian” (ch. 31)—but
instead, an uncompromising advocate for reason and self-interest. That
commitment to rationality informs Rand’s distinctive intellectual
approach, manifest in the essays in this book: she penetrates to the timeless,
fundamental ideas underlying a given event, movement, or issue.

In “The Lessons of Vietnam,” for example, Rand argues (ch. 14) that the
fundamental failure of that war lay not with America’s military, but with its
morally bankrupt intellectual and political leaders. Discussing the persistence
of world hunger (ch. 28), she notes that its cause is not a shortage of Western
financial support, but a shortage in the Third World of Western ideas.
Culpability for the death of Marilyn Monroe (ch. 16), Rand argues, rests with
anyone who has ever felt and given voice to a resentment against human
achievement. The enduring tragedy of American businessmen, she explains (ch.
15), is that they lend moral (and financial) support to their own
destroyers.

The Voice of Reason also features a number of landmark essays on
philosophy and its relation to human life. Rand discusses religion’s
war on human life (ch. 8); considers the progressive psychological damage
incurred by men who embrace the ethics of altruism (ch. 6), and responds to
the popular question “Who decides what is right or wrong?” by explaining the
profound error contained in this question (ch. 4).

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction by Leonard Peikoff

Part One: Philosophy

Introducing Objectivism

Review of Aristotle by John Herman Randall, Jr.

To Young Scientists

Who Is the Final Authority in Ethics?

The Psychology of Psychologizing

Altruism as Appeasement

The Question of Scholarships

Of Living Death

Religion vs. America by Leonard Peikoff

Part Two: Culture

The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age

Our Cultural Value-Deprivation

Global Balkanization

How to Read (and Not to Write)

The Lessons of Vietnam

The Sanction of the Victims

Through Your Most Grievous Fault

Apollo 11

Epitaph for a Culture

Assault from the Ivory Tower: The Professor’s War Against America by Leonard Peikoff

The American School: Why Johnny Can’t Think by Leonard Peikoff

Part Three: Politics

Representation Without Authorization

To Dream the Noncommercial Dream

Tax Credits for Education

Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason

The Pull Peddlers

About a Woman President

The Inverted Moral Priorities

Hunger and Freedom

How Not to Fight Against Socialized Medicine

Medicine: The Death of a Profession by Leonard Peikoff

Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty by Peter Schwartz

Epilogue. My Thirty Years With Ayn Rand: An Intellectual Memoir by Leonard Peikoff